It’s no secret that housing is a favorite feature of any game for MassivelyOP’s MJ, and she’s excited to take a peek at FFXIV’s system. Of course, since she doesn’t own an abode herself, she’ll possibly be trespassing a bit here and there trying to sneak a look inside the homes of others. How many houses will she find unlocked to wander into? Tune in live at 1:00 p.m. to join her for the tour.

The purpose of magical damage in Final Fantasy XIV is to ruin everything. Really. You get a huge group of enemies together, and then you ruin them with a barrage of magical forces. Not literally using Ruin most of the time, that works its way into your rotation but isn’t a mandatory thing at all times. Though it’s pretty important for Summoners, I know. Mostly as a filler.

Just as ranged DPS and melee DPS has a niche in the game, magical DPS has its niche, and while Summoner was originally sold as a bit more of a debuffer than simply a DPS with a heavy damage-over-time element, we’re here now. So to round out the previous columns on the DPS jobs in the game, let’s take a look at the two damage-dealing casters in all of their glory. Mind the explosions, those show up a lot. Also mind the damage fields. It’s sort of their thing.

I’m not really on board with the trend of saying that big expansions are back. They never left. Sure, we have one coming out for Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2, but World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy XIV have all been keeping the faith for a long while now. Their format shifted for a while as game distribution formats shifted, but the idea of a big expansion has never gone away, just taken a drubbing from the popular adage of “let’s launch lots of little expansions over and over.”

Me, I’ve never been a fan of that approach. I wasn’t a fan of it with Guild Wars 2 when the game first made that a selling point, and I haven’t been fond of the games jumping on the bandwagon since then. And there are a lot of reasons why I’m in favor of slower patches and expansion with more content versus faster and smaller.

In honor of the anniversary of the original release of FFXIV (before A Realm Reborn), MassivelyOP’s MJ is delving back into the beautiful lands of Eorzea. She’s been gone quite a while, so there is plenty to do. She could continue her questing, dive into a Duty, or just wander the world admiring its many splendors. Tune in live at 7:00 p.m. to see just how much trouble she can get herself into.

I’ve been a sneaky columnist, my friends. Oh yes I have. In my last Jukebox Heroes I posted my top six favorite MMO soundtracks, partially because I wanted to share, but also partially because I wanted to see the responses. I judged — correctly — that music fans would come out of the woodwork to champion their own favorite scores.

Quietly, I began collecting your comments and even favorite tracks, extending this secretive poll to include a Daily Grind I proposed on this subject. Compiling all of the information between the two, I came up with a list of not my, but your favorite MMO soundtracks without opening it up to vote manipulation.

So do you want to know what the collective Massively Overpowered audience thinks are the best MMO soundtracks to date? Read on as I list the the top 20 (in order) that you nominated!

How many times a day do you think about aetherial gear in Final Fantasy XIV? If the answer is more than “zero,” I’m honestly kind of surprised. It’s my job to think about these things, and even I don’t really put much thought into it. It’s just there, filling out mid-level dungeon drops with random stats that might be great or might be absolute crap, with very little in-between.

Apparently, Naoki Yoshida thinks about it a fair bit, since it’s getting something of a rebirth with the contents of patch 3.1. A big deal was made of the fact that the explorable company airship islands will include aetherial gear up to level 210, which is… interesting. And it raises a whole lot of questions and speculation, none of which has unfortunately been shared in any reliable English formats as of yet and might not exist in Japanese formats, either.

When it launched, Star Wars: The Old Republic was one of the biggest video game voice-over projects that BioWare or any studio had ever done. It boasted over 200,000 lines of dialogue voiced by more than 200 actors, a number that’s only grown with new missions and expansions.

With so many voice actors lending their talents, it shouldn’t be too surprising to occasionally find yourself going, “Now where have I heard that person before? He or she sounds so familiar.” I’ve done that so often that I wanted to make a list of some of the bigger celebrities and actors who are behind the characters that the SWTOR community’s interacted with since 2012.

Here are just 10 of the many great talents that helped to create this game experience — and I didn’t even have room to include Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Armin Shimerman, which I feel is a darn shame.

Honestly, ranged damage is a field that’s never quite appealed to me as much as other options for doing stuff. Not just in Final Fantasy XIV, but in anything. I love tanking, I love healing, I love providing solid damage – but give me a choice of how to do so, and I’d rather be up in the paint slicing something’s face off than attacking from a distance. And that’s with my love of gunplay.

Still, that doesn’t mean that FFXIV‘s ranged damage needs to suffer, does it? Although it really sort of is suffering, at the moment – neither Bards nor Machinists are in a great place, though arguably the former is in a worse place than the latter at the moment. But let’s take a look at both of these jobs, what their expected roles are, and what makes them cool or not – you know, the usual. I’ve done this column format twice before, I assume you recognize it by now.

“You have to love randomly running across a band when you enter a building in Bree,” reader Yrys said in conjunction with this picture from Lord of the Rings Online.

I have to agree. Players congregating to perform music, put on plays, referee games, or otherwise doing mass social activities that aren’t revolving around murdering giant beasts always brings me to a screeching halt in MMOs, for these are almost always worth checking out.

It’s a virtual party today in One Shots! Grab some of those delectable colors, take a tall drink of perspective, and party like it’s 1999 and there are only three MMOs on the market!

Final Fantasy XIV is not a game with action combat, but you can still be pretty thoroughly screwed whilst trying to play the game if your connection is bad. This has been a major problem for European players, since the game’s server clusters are located in North America and Japan. So European players will likely be happy to know that the game is moving one of its data centers to Europe, allowing players on the Chaos server cluster to have a more local and less laggy play experience.

The down side is that players on those servers will be experiencing several days of downtime; players who had characters on those worlds before today and have an active subscription will be compensated for lost play time, which is expected to be anywhere between three to five days. Players on those servers will also be given the option to transfer off for free. You can check out all of the the details on the official site, but the practical upshot will hopefully be a more pleasant play experience for European players.

If you happen to be in Tokyo for the Tokyo Game Show this week, make sure to drop by the Sony booth to gawk, as Square-Enix has told Japanese fans that it will be showing Final Fantasy XIV on Sony’s Project Morpheus VR platform.